Why are all the living card games dead?

Imagine you’re in a universe where chess isn’t sold as one product. You’re in the universe where when you walk into a game store, you find Chess starter sets and booster packs. A starter set gives you enough pieces to play: 14 pawns, a knight, and a king.

You sit down to play against your friend who has been playing a few months longer than you and started attending local tournaments. He fields 2 queens and a rook, bishop, and two knights against your starter set. If you want more pieces, he tells you that the cheapest way to get some more is to buy a booster pack of random pieces.

He further explains that the odds of finding a queen in a booster are quite low, so he decided to buy a case of boosters to find one. He was able to trade 3 knights and a rook for his second queen. You can see in a trash bin he has thrown away at least two dozen of what he calls “bulk pawns”.

It’s at this point he tells you that in a few months the new “Pawns of Absolution” booster set will be released with new queens that can also move like knights. He expects to buy another case of random boosters hunting for one of these Knight-Queens.

Your friend sees your look of confusion and cheerily informs you that if you don’t want to chase the random boosters, you can pre-order a Knight-Queen on the secondary market for only $115.

Thanks, I hate it.

If that sounds like an unappealing model for Chess then why does it make millions of dollars in profit for card games? Why haven’t any of the games that challenged this model directly overtaken it? In fact, not only have they failed to overtake it, most of them have outright stopped being supported or produced. The new card games that are coming out today (Lorcana, One Piece, Gundam, Riftbound, Star Wars Unlimited) are all random booster based games. It didn’t have to be this way.

In the 2010s Fantasy Flight Games recognized that there might be a market for people interested in the kind of gameplay that trading card games offered but without all the hassle of chasing random cards or buying singles. They produced a slew of products under a new model they called the “Living Card Game”. New expansions would regularly come out, ban lists would be tweaked, cards would be errata’d, and tournaments would be held at local stores. But every card was available for purchase in non-randomized expansions and core sets.

FFG produced living card games for The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Star Wars, Warhammer 40k, Android: Netrunner, Legend of the Five Rings, Arkham Horror, and Marvel. Huge IPs that grabbed a lot of attention when they landed in stores. Most of these games burned brightly for two or three years before slowly collapsing in on themselves. Of that long list only two of them are still being officially supported: Arkham Horror and Marvel Champions. Notably, Arkham and Marvel are both cooperative titles and not competitive games. A lot of competitive gamers gave a lot of these games a try and stuck around for a long time off the backs of the community that formed around them. In particular, Android: Netrunner is still maintained to this day by a fan community that is actively producing new cards for it.

What happened to the official support? Why did the living card games mostly die off?

1. Psychology is a bitch - It can’t be denied that, for many players, a part of the “fun” of card games like Magic: the Gathering and Pokemon is collecting cards and cracking packs open. Often the highest value chase cards which players are looking for aren’t the most powerful in the game but ones with rare alternative arts, unique holographic effects, etc. Even if opening randomized packs isn’t the primary way in which you buy cards, you will still get boosters or randomized product. Even if you’re buying pre-made decks they often include a booster pack or a 1 of 5 alternate art printing. If you’re engaging with any of the big popular trading card games you’re getting some level of randomized dopamine boosting off of their product. They are juicing us, folks.

While I’m not a fan of designing products this way it is obvious why people like it. And to be clear, it’s not like my brain is immune to this either. I’ve played basically every trading card game I could get my hands on for at least a few rounds. I love cracking a pack as much as the next over-evolved ape. But I think most people recognize that, even while it is fun, it’s kind of a sham. Like going to a casino in Vegas, you’re cracking packs for the experience and not because you actually expect to pull that mythic rare/hit the jackpot playing slots. (But maybe this time?)

On a base level, LCGs just don’t have that. By definition, they sold you exactly what they said on the tin. Your brain doesn’t get to pull the magic dopamine lever of anticipation and surprise. While some gamers (including me) view this as a strength, a cavalcade of market forces and human tendencies collided to doom most of these games to a short life span.

2. LCG’s cost of entry was constantly rising - To continually drive engagement from players (and to continually make more money), new products were regularly being released for these games. There were big box releases called “deluxe expansions” which often brought a ton of cards and new major mechanics or factions into the game and then there were smaller packs sold in cycles. For Android, there were 5 deluxe expansions and 48 data packs. Maybe players were freed from the shackles of randomness but they were essentially required to buy cards every other month in order to keep up with the meta. And that’s just the problem for the players who started playing at launch.

If you wanted to join the game and play competitively after a few years into the launch of an LCG you may require cards from literally dozens of these packs to construct your optimized deck. There was no quick and easy path to “just playing”. LCGs mostly did not sell pre-constructed decks. This presented a confusing array of options to a new player just trying to get their feet wet. And if you were ready to dive into a competitive deck you had to sink hundreds of dollars for all the various expansions needed. At that point a lot of players ask themselves, why wouldn’t I just play the more popular card games my friends are already playing? The supposedly cheaper promise of the LCG model evaporates when it tries to copy the trading card model of constant expansion.

3. The traditional TCG model is better for your Friendly Local Game Store - As a result of #2, LCGs had to compete for immediate shelf space with other TCGs. Boosters have a significantly more profitable presence at the front counter that drives impulse buys in a way these small pre-determined expansions for LCGs never could. As a result your store owner is unlikely to keep living card game core sets on that valuable shelf space. Once your local community has purchased the most recent expansion, the rest will sit unsold. On top of that, FFG put out half a dozen games in a short period of time with competing audiences. Undoubtedly there was overlap between Netrunner and Warhammer 40k, or Legend of the Five Rings and Game of Thrones. They flooded their own market by being over excited with IP licenses.

But because there is no incentive or “chase value” off random card packs in any LCG, the local players have no reason to keep buying those products from the store once they have their one copy even if they were invested in more than one LCG. As a result of all of these pressures, if they are stocked at all they get relegated to a smaller section for board games and often a store owner has to guess at which of these products will be popular with their local card players. But those products aren’t packaged and marketed as board games, so they also do poorly with that crowd.

Traditional TCG boosters have another advantage for the local store over the LCGs in that the products have a giftability factor. A single booster pack is relatively cheap and easy to pick up for your friend or family.  Oh it’s your birthday? Do you like Pokemon/Magic/One Piece cards? Here’s a few boosters. You don’t have to think about if they already have this product, even if they’ve opened some chances are good there’s some kind of rare card in the set that they haven’t pulled yet.

4. The marriage to IP helped as much as it hurt - This is a problem specific to Fantasy Flight Games, but FFG was largely the company leading this market experiment. In order to get immediate buy-in and interest for their game systems FFG smartly slapped tons of hot intellectual property all over their cards. While this generated a ton of hype for fans of those properties and undoubtedly brought players into the tabletop gaming ecosystem who wouldn’t have been there otherwise, it also meant that when those rights went away so did the product.

I want to again acknowledge that Android: Netrunner is a unique case in so far as the organization that came together to keep it going after its official death has been nothing short of extraordinary, but it is the exception that proves the rule. Also, as a business study, it still effectively failed as a commercial product once Wizards of the Coast decided they didn’t like FFG taking a chunk out of their market share. Whether it’s Warhammer, Star Wars, or Marvel, the company that is producing those games is beholden to that licensee.
You also open yourself up to the whims of these massive temperamental fanbases. The Game of Thrones card game I’m sure sold a lot of copies for a lot of years, but once the popularity died down, the game was cooked. It was never going to keep getting official support.

The LCG Identity Crisis

The fundamental problem with most LCGs wasn't the fixed distribution model. It’s a part of the problem, but it isn’t the whole picture. These games failed to take full advantage of their own medium and remained too much like trading card games. Instead of embracing what made them unique, they tried copying TCG expansion schedules without the psychological hooks that make those schedules profitable for stores or fun for players. It was a mish mash of design ethos and the reality of retail and how players buy stuff. I believe that LCGs did have the opportunity to create something genuinely different: complete, self-contained strategic systems that could generate endless gameplay through emergent complexity rather than artificial content drip-feeding.

The release schedule put an impossible demand on the game designers and on the players. Every LCG expansion needed to justify its existence to competitive players AND casual players, while booster pack games could include "chaff" that served other purposes like limited formats or budget alternatives. This meant LCG designers had to make every single card mechanically interesting and competitively relevant, creating enormous pressure that led to power creep, excessive complexity, and increasingly narrow design spaces.
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Consider how games like Chess or StarCraft achieve decades of strategic depth with fixed rule sets. These games don't need constant expansions because their core systems are rich enough to support evolving metas, emerging strategies, and continuous discovery. Players spend years mastering the same pieces or units, finding new combinations and counter-strategies that the designers never explicitly intended. This is the model I believe could have let LCGs thrive: creating dense, mechanically rich systems where the complete card pool enables deep strategic exploration. Provide expansions, but make them infrequent and impactful.

What can an indie learn from all this?

When we designed Black Hats, we specifically tried to learn from these failures. Rather than planning expansion cycles from day one, we focused on cramming as much strategic density as possible into a single box. The goal was to create a chess-like experience using card game mechanics where new strategies and meta developments emerge organically from players exploring the complete system, not from publishers releasing new content every month. We wanted to prove that a card game could achieve long-term engagement through mechanical depth rather than artificial scarcity or content treadmills.

This approach also addresses the expansion fatigue that killed many LCGs. When players are already invested in Magic, Pokemon, or other ongoing TCGs, asking them to keep up with yet another monthly release schedule is unsustainable. Most card game players don't want (or can’t afford) a dozen different games demanding constant financial investment. It is better to offer them a game that rewards deep engagement over time with the types of mechanics and strategy they already love. By creating complete, standalone experiences that don't require ongoing purchases, a new card game might actually compete for mindshare rather than wallet share.

The LCG model's greatest strength was always the promise of a level playing field where strategy mattered more than spending power. But most LCGs squandered this advantage by becoming subscription services in disguise, trading the gambling problem of boosters for the commitment problem of endless expansion cycles. The real opportunity lies in combining LCG accessibility with board game completeness: creating strategic systems rich enough to sustain communities for years without requiring constant feeding from the publisher's content pipeline.

I may have overstated my thesis a little in the title of this blog post. Not ALL of the LCGs are dead entirely. More like on life support. However, the fact that some LCGs have continued after their official demise and the initial incredibly positive reaction to almost all of these games at their launch tells me that there is still a hunger for what they were providing. The great work that these designers did and the genuine risk taking that FFG took in bringing these games to market was impressive. I just wish more of them were still around.

​Anyway, that’s basically why we made Black Hats the way we did. Who would’ve read a post titled that?